Marc Munroe Dion: City government should work for us

Thursday morning, I was eating french toast in Rosaria's Diner, The Herald News open on the counter in front of me, and I had one of the “front page moments” I get sometimes.

Marc Munroe DionHerald News Columnist

Thursday morning, I was eating french toast in Rosaria’s Diner, The Herald News open on the counter in front of me, and I had one of the “front page moments” I get sometimes.

A story on the left side of the front page told me the water and sewer rates won’t go up (not today, anyway) and another story told me a private school is closing.

The stories belonged together.

Every year in the 21 years I’ve written a column for the this newspaper, the city has gotten a little poorer. Other private schools have closed.

In the middle and at the bottom, we’re aware of what is happening. Up top, they don’t seem to know. About 10,000 people fled Fall River before the last census. I’ll bet they were working people, or people who wanted to work, maybe people who used to work at Quaker.

Who pays the taxes those people used to pay? Who fills their pews in church? When their parents die, my guess is those people will return from Georgia just long enough to sell Dad’s three-decker, probably to someone who won’t live on the first floor.

And there’s a closed corner store, an abandoned fish market, a former barroom, a used-to-be bakery and a Catholic school turned into apartments, all within 10 blocks of Dad’s old house.

And you read the paper while you’re home and you see that the city continues to be run exactly as it was in 1963, that personalities matter more than planning, that “trust to luck” is still the motto of those doing the city budget.

People are still “talking politics,” and most of the ones talking are white, over 50, non-Spanish-speaking and very often unemployed or at least underemployed and all of them have some much-admired relative who works for the city and lives in Westport or Dartmouth or Swansea because, increasingly, city employees are becoming an occupying army.

And it all seems so tired to you and so circular.

I’m not that old and I can remember when police officers and firefighters were blue collar people and their fates were linked to the fates of the city residents among whom they lived. Same thing with teachers.

The budget mess going on right now is every year’s budget mess, handled by Flanagan as it was handled by Correia.

We speak about it in tiny details, about which councilor is voting with which councilor and we say wise sounding things like, “Oh, that’s his boy,” a piece of language right out of the 1940s, when it was last useful.

And out on the sidewalk, it means nothing, nothing at all.

If you’re watching the meeting on television, watching the mouths move, that’s good enough. If you’re anywhere else, if you know a lot of out-of-work people, some very poor people, some people who aren’t Caucasian, it’s not good enough.

When people move out, when companies like Quaker leave and the wages they paid are never replaced, when private schools vanish and public schools can’t be funded, it isn’t time to “face the challenges” in the budget on a year-by-year basis.

It’s time to think about the city, not just keep shoveling coal into its creaky, leaky old boilers. It’s time to demolish unneeded housing stock. It’s time to elect city councilors by ward, so neighborhood associations won’t be formed to do the job city councilors should be doing.

It’s time to come up with an unpleasant plan to permanently decrease the size and cost of city government and it’s time to do that without checking the “Fall River Book of Friends and Cousins,” which lists the names of those people entitled to city employment.

The idea at the top is that, no matter how many people leave the city, no matter how little work there is, no government job will go unfunded and all layoffs are temporary. If there are fewer people in the city, then everyone is just going to have to pay more in taxes to support the “public servants,” whose wages, benefits, retirement age, pension size and usefulness must never be questioned.

And that isn’t working.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.